Government analysing Elections Observer reports to pave way for legislative reforms: Minister

GOVERNMENT is in the process of analysing Elections Observer reports to pave way for legislative reforms, a Cabinet Minister has said.

In an interview, Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Cde Ziyambi Ziyambi, who also chairs the Cabinet Task Force on Political and Electoral Reforms, said his committee has started to analyse the observer reports.

“The major task is really to look at the observer reports, study them. So we have set up a working team of officials to come up with the critical areas that we have to study and then motivate debate within the country to say these are the issues, what are the critical issues that we believe can take us forward. Where necessary, we then institute the necessary legislative reforms after presenting our report to Cabinet,” said Minister Ziyambi.

Election Observers presented various reports to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission and Government following last year’s harmonised elections which were deemed to be free and fair.

However, the observers also noted that there were areas that needed to be addressed.

Minister Ziyambi said the Cabinet Task Force is also looking into the ease of doing business aspect among other pieces of legislation which need to be repealed.

“I’m also pushing for my Ministry reforms within the Prisons and Correctional Services. We now have principles of the new Bill repealing the Prisons Act so that we have this paradigm shift where people believe that once you have been sent to prison, you are a condemned individual. We want people to embrace this aspect of rehabilitation so that we have our prisoners reintegrated into society. These are some of the issues that we are looking at,” he said.

Minister Ziyambi however, said financial challenges are a major hindrance to the Ministry’s reform agenda.

Most people hardly find acceptance back into society once they are incarcerated resulting in some of them being repeat offenders. — @nqotshili